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Reparations for the 1921 Tulsa, OK Race Riot

2001 Action of Immediate Witness

Guided by our commitment to justice and by the findings and
recommendations of The Tulsa Race Riot, A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to
Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; and

Because our Tulsan Unitarian Universalist forebears witnessed an atrocity of
ethnic cleansing for which we are responsible to account, to reconcile and to
repair; and

Whereas the Tulsa Race Riot is consistent with a pattern of assaults and
riots in many communities across America; and

Whereas, following the Tulsa Tribune’s editorial suggesting the probability
of a lynching in Tulsa that night, frenzy spread throughout Tulsa. That evening,
in the presence of two thousand white Tulsans, seventy-five African American
World War I veterans met the sheriff at the courthouse, offering to protect a
young black man jailed for assaulting a white elevator operator based on
accusations that were later recanted; and

Whereas, after rioting began, the City of Tulsa Police Department deputized
five hundred members of the white mob, and the State of Oklahoma mobilized units
of the National Guard armed with the city's machine gun mounted on a flatbed
truck; and

Whereas the District of Greenwood's citizens defended their community through
the nighttime hours and faced at daylight an overwhelming assault by five
thousand to ten thousand white Tulsans, whom the Ku Klux Klan probably helped to
mobilize; and

Whereas the mob systematically emptied homes, detained residents, murdered
those found to be armed, looted homes and businesses, and then burned them down
resulting in:

Around three hundred deaths, according to the official report of the Red
Cross,

Forty square blocks burned to the ground including 1,265 homes, as well as
hospitals, schools, and churches,

One hundred and fifty businesses leveled in the district known as Black Wall
Street, and

Six thousand black Tulsans detained; and

Whereas the Commission has now submitted its report to the governor of
Oklahoma on February 28, 2001, and the Tulsa Reparations Coalition has just
launched a campaign to implement the Commission’s recommendations in the coming
year, because the 118 survivors of the 1921 Riot are dying;

Therefore Be It Resolved that the 2001 General Assembly of the Unitarian
Universalist Association endorses the recommendations of the Commission as
stated in its final report:

The direct payment of reparations to survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot;

The direct payment of reparations to descendants of the victims and of the
survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot;

The establishment of a scholarship fund available to students affected by
the Tulsa Race Riot;

The establishment of an economic development enterprise zone in the historic
area of the Greenwood District; and

The creation of a memorial for the reburial of any human remains found in
the search for unmarked graves of riot victims.